Science Quote by Marvin Harris

Harris is doing what he does best: taking a seemingly small dietary fact and turning it into an X-ray of modern life. The line isn’t really about sugar as a sweetener; it’s about a historical pivot where industrial efficiency severs eating from consequence. By pointing to “purifying” techniques, he targets a specific kind of progress: technology that doesn’t just make food cheaper or safer, but strips it of the messy constraints that once linked taste to nutrition and local ecology.

The intent is diagnostic, almost clinical, yet the subtext is moral. “Not good nutritionally or ecologically” is a double indictment that refuses the usual trade-off story (bad for your body, but good for the economy). Harris frames industrial sugar as a paradigmatic commodity: engineered for shelf life, transport, and profit, while externalizing costs onto human health and the environment. The “we” matters. It implicates consumers without pretending the choice is purely individual; industrial systems create appetites and normalize them.

Contextually, Harris is writing from a late-20th-century anthropology that treated food as infrastructure: calories moving through power relations, colonial trade routes, plantation economies, and later, processed-food supply chains. Sugar is historically entangled with land conversion, coerced labor, and monoculture; purification becomes a metaphor for how modernity cleans up the product while dirtying everything else. The line works because it compresses that whole story into a blunt contemporary dilemma: abundance that is, by design, depleted.